No love for "The Lost Tomb"

Monday, March 05, 2007

It's tough to find any Christian leader or clergy to validate James Cameron's faith-busting documentary, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus". From Newsday:

"The Lost Tomb of Jesus," produced by "Titanic" director James Cameron and directed by Toronto filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, claims that 10 2,000-year-old caskets found in a Jerusalem suburb in 1980 may have held the remains of Jesus and his family. Two caskets bear the names "Mariamene" and "Judah, son of Jesus," suggesting, the filmmakers say, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child with her.

The film is scheduled to air Sunday at 9 p.m. on the Discovery Channel.

If the movie's hypothesis is true, the evidence would challenge a central tenet of Christianity: that Jesus defied death and rose to heaven three days after he was crucified.

The Rev. Ann Van Cleef, pastor of Orient Congregational United Church of Christ, said she would "absolutely not" preach about the movie. "I preach out of the Bible, which has truth in it," she said. "I might save this one for a sermon on sin."

The Rationale

"If you believe love should be uncritical, you
may soon be thinking that I do not love this church. But my experience has been
that to be a member of the United Church of Christ is, almost by definition, to
be a critic of it. To be uncritical is to be the real oddball in this church.
Perhaps to be uncritical is to be un-Christian".

-From The United Church of Christ
Tomorrow, THEOLOGY AND IDENTITY: TRADITIONS, MOVEMENTS, AND POLITY IN THE
UCC (Pilgrim Press: 1990), edited by Dan Johnson